NAME¶
perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
NOTE¶
Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the
maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2
in AmigaOS. See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS" if you want to
help fixing this problem.
SYNOPSIS¶
One can read this document in the following formats:
man perlamiga
multiview perlamiga.guide
to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be read
as
is: either as
README.amiga, or
pod/perlamiga.pod.
A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets section
of the Aminet:
http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg
DESCRIPTION¶
Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS¶
- Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
- You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most
important part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the
latest versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (
<http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/> ):
ixemul-bin
ixemul-env-bin
pdksh-bin
Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other packages
of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).
- Version of Amiga OS
- You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended
is version 3.1.
Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS¶
Start your Perl program
foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the
same way as on any other platform, by
perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3
If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as
opposed to your program), use
perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's
Execute
command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit of
your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with
foo arg1 arg2 arg3
(Note that having *nixish full path to perl
/usr/bin/perl is not
necessary,
perl would be enough, but having full path would make it
easier to use your script under *nix.)
Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS¶
Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:
- •
- fork()
- •
- some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count
and file dates
- •
- inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
- •
- umask() works, but the correct permissions are only
set when the file is finally close()d
INSTALLATION¶
Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract the
binary distribution:
lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha
or
tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz
(Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)
For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.
Accessing documentation¶
Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS¶
If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl
manpages, use something like this:
man perlfunc
man less
man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
man perl
Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in the
/ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl library will
not be found.
Note that dot (
.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3 above - to
avoid shadowing by the
less(1) manpage.
Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS¶
If you have some WWW browser available, you can build
HTML docs. Cd to
directory with
.pod files, and do like this
cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
pod2html
After this you can direct your browser the file
perl.html in this
directory, and go ahead with reading docs.
Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".
Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS¶
Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with
"CPerl" mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info"
from "CPAN", or, alternately, prebuilt info pages.
Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS¶
Can be constructed using "pod2latex".
BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS¶
Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS¶
You need to have the latest
ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from
Aminet.
Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS¶
You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and extract
it with:
tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz
or get the official source from CPAN:
http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0
Extract it like this
tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz
You will see a message about errors while extracting
Configure. This is
normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
configure, but it causes no harm.)
Making Perl on AmigaOS¶
Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)
sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg
Now type
make depend
Now!
make
Testing Perl on AmigaOS¶
Now run
make test
Some tests will be skipped because they need the
fork() function:
io/pipe.t,
op/fork.t,
lib/filehand.t,
lib/open2.t,
lib/open3.t,
lib/io_pipe.t,
lib/io_sock.t
Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS¶
Run
make install
PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS¶
As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2. After Perl
5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file pod/perlhack.pod for
how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped its internal support for
vfork(), and that was very probably the step that broke AmigaOS (since
the ixemul library has only vfork). The build finally fails when the
ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL ends up as "0" in the
produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not quite work. Also,
executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate nothing: very probably
related to the (v)fork problems.
Fixing the breakage requires someone quite
familiar with the ixemul library, and how one is supposed to run
external commands in AmigaOS without fork().
AUTHORS¶
Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson,
trg@privat.utfors.se
SEE ALSO¶
perl(1).